


becoming what you eat

by _bspctcldwrites (dashinaname)



Category: Gameboys (Web Series 2020), Pearl Next Door (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, Fluff, Mild Gore, Mutual Pining, One-Sided Attraction, The Author Regrets Nothing, Valentine's Day, harlequin valentine - Freeform, i know the tags may be confusing but they will make sense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-14 22:16:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29425878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dashinaname/pseuds/_bspctcldwrites
Summary: She was the Harlequin until she wasn’t.
Relationships: Pearl Gatdula/Alex Aguirre, Pearl Gatdula/Karleen Gregorio
Kudos: 7





	becoming what you eat

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fayelafee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fayelafee/gifts).



> This is based on Neil Gaiman’s Harlequin Valentine, an unabashed retelling. If you know, you know.
> 
> Also probably inspired by this [post](https://t.co/uyZBDVEo5l?amp=1/) from Adrianna So's Instagram. 
> 
> I wrote this while sniffling and sneezing and coughing and mildly delirious from cold-induced brain fog.
> 
> (Happy Valentine's Day, baby.)

Shortly after the ninth train departs for Quirino station, around the time of day when the crowds both on and beyond the streets have started to thin, Pearl pins her heart to Karleen’s door. It is the color of spleen, more brown than fictitiously-depicted red, veiny and startlingly the textbook definition size of a fist.

Pearl lifts gloved knuckles, then knocks on the wood, a _rat-tat-tat!_ that, despite having a ring to it, easily drowns in the morning hullabaloo of the metropolis. Faint rattling is heard from within the small apartment, and Pearl spins her beribboned wand, her treasured staff, her precious cane. She vanishes into thin air with a giggle, she with her red and blue and white costume speckled with diamonds. And Karleen, oh so beautiful Karleen, emerges from her abode.

Her Columbine, her Valentine, spies the heart pinned to the door, turns her head from one end of the corridor to the other, and, with that endearing scrunch of sculpted eyebrows, slinks back into the apartment, Pearl sliding in with her.

Karleen’s slick ponytail swooshes as she meanders about the kitchen. She takes three pulls of paper towel and a spray bottle of diluted detergent from one of the cupboards, then plucks a sandwich bag from the counter on her way to the door. All the time Pearl hovers by her shoulder, tilting her blonde head so one clumsy step unbecoming of a Harlequin would have her nuzzling Karleen’s caramel-smooth neck. In so doing she can chase the lingering scent of coffee and bread that she doesn’t recall or know one bit, but can name because that’s what a Harlequin in love is like.

And Pearl _knows_ because last night she trailed after Karleen as her amore exited a coffee shop, untied ebony locks caught in the evening breeze. She held a bag of bread with one hand and a cup of coffee with the other, and Pearl gazed upon her from outside her window as her Columbine consumed the warm delicacies with a small smile upon her exquisite face. Had it been any other night, Pearl would have gone and slipped inside with Karleen, but last night was the night before Valentine’s Day, and no other should compare.

The Harlequin chuckles, striped hat slipping, at the thought of what she has in store for herself and Karleen. Tonight, she will show her the proper way to make love, an art that she has mastered and found success in with all her other Columbines of eons past. An art that will guarantee winning Karleen’s heart, and, finally, after many tribulations and prolonged yearning, make her Pearl’s in this lifetime, and rightfully so.

Karleen opens the door once more and removes the pin, Pearl’s precious hatpin that she bought somewhere in Manila’s underbelly. Pearl is unable to pinpoint where exactly the hatpin hailed from, probably one of Lawton’s infamous underpasses long before they were made infamous for bloodcurdling felony rather than the good-natured pranks of Pearl’s handiwork that preceded them. Such a turn of events was a subject of great despondency prior to Karleen’s wondrous waltz into her heart.

Her heart, which now falls into the sandwich bag with a wet _thunk,_ and the entire package, into a gray knit bag slung across Karleen’s shoulder. The hairpin, bearing some funny little friar’s face akin to that of a Pierrot, is slipped into one of the pockets of Karleen’s light denim jacket. Pearl remembers the oversized jacket quite well—one that Karleen never returned to the second lady who trampled all over her heart. Pearl found this choice to keep the jacket unsettling at first, then increasingly fascinating. She likes her Columbine troubled, for a troubled heart is impervious to most human advances, and Pearl is no mere mortal. Pearl is better than any mortal.

Her Columbine proceeds to spray the door with the detergent, and the now thinned blood from the heart runs down the wood, wiped off with the paper towel. As Karleen makes good work of the mess that Pearl made upon her door, the Harlequin stares at her face, rid of anything else but focus, and falls in love all over again.

If her heart weren’t presently in the sandwich bag, it would have thumped against Pearl’s bosom. She is fairly acquainted with the feelings that come with infatuation, feelings of heartburn that elicit the desire to heave, and Pearl sure is having trouble staying on her nimble feet.

Oh, how troublesome to be a Harlequin in love.

Once Karleen is satisfied with the door, she slips into her home briefly before resurfacing outside in her jacket and with Pearl’s heart in her bag. Pearl capers behind her as her Columbine walks out and into the street, sometimes drifting off to empty lanes and other times sticking to potholed pavement. Crisp February air hits her and she wraps the jacket tighter around her. Pearl wants nothing more than to drape herself over Karleen’s shoulders to keep her darling warm and render the jacket of a former flame useless.

But she holds off on that, for Pearl will not spoil her surprise of invigorating evening romance. Interaction is a fine thing, a very good thing that her soul desires, but not just yet. Karleen deserves a surprise of her lifetime.

And so Pearl dances and capers beside Karleen, singing merrily of the magnanimity and awesomeness of her as they stroll down the street of Pedro Gil. Every now and then they come across a cart or a vendor on foot, bearing scentless flowers and heart-shaped balloons, the last resort of the uninspired for their poor paramours.

Some fifteen minutes later, Karleen turns for the teaching hospital, walking into one of the low gates flanked at one side by a guard post. The guard, a lady with a severe, weathered expression, doesn’t budge at Karleen’s greeting. Pearl reads her and unearths a cold morning spent on the train, and digs further to see that this afternoon after five, she will shuck off her uniform, pack her bags, and take the same route home, and home is an empty studio apartment devoid of any human warmth most looked forward to by most everyone today.

Despite herself, Pearl feels a tug at her detached heart. She holds her gloved palm against the lady guard’s cheek, then says, “Today, you will receive a rose from someone who will cherish you. They will love you so dearly that they will find beautiful even the scowl that, I regret to inform you, has taken permanent residence upon your face.” The guard blinks at her, as if she could see or hear Pearl. But she can’t because no one can, and Pearl drifts off to catch up with Karleen.

Her Valentine continues trudging up uneven asphalt to the general direction of the trauma ward, already teeming with patients in various degrees of distress, mostly unfounded. Karleen slips into the annex, which Pearl belatedly realizes is the morgue.

Karleen pushes open the first door to the right, and greets the doctor bent over a darkened corpse. “Good morning, Cairo.”

“Ah, morning, Karleen,” the pathologist murmurs, half his face behind a surgical mask. Pearl picks up on the faint scent of mentholatum over all else that reeks, probably slathered beneath the doctor’s nose. He makes an incision across the dead man’s chest, shoulder joint to shoulder joint. The deceased’s eyes follow Pearl as she frisks her way beside the autopsy table. “What brings you? Looking for a job?” Cairo asks Karleen just as the dead man treats Pearl with a panicked stare that says, _Begone, Harlequin!_

“This is a heart, isn’t it?” Karleen asks, brandishing Pearl’s heart, still in the sandwich bag. At the same time, Pearl answers the dead man: _How brave of you in death now that you see me. Do you recall that one time you lost your underpants while you shat in a dirty bathroom stall in Binondo after slashing a poor grandma’s purse?_

“That is indeed a heart, Karleen,” says Cairo. “A very healthy heart, well taken care of. Whoever gave it to you must be skilled. The cut is clean.” Pearl preens at the compliment.

The dead man’s stare turns all the more icy. Pearl covers her lips with her gloved hand as she laughs. It’s as good an accusation as any.

“What should I do with it?”

“Burn it, or surrender it to the police.”

Pearl feels her heart sink at the thought of it rising to the firmament in ashes, or Karleen giving it away like some past Columbines had done when they had grown tired of it. It is the dead man’s turn to laugh, and Pearl hisses at him.

“And be instantly branded as a serial killer? I refuse to contribute to the dirty cops’ monthly quota of arrests,” Karleen says, slipping the heart back into the bag, much to Pearl’s relief. The man on the table grumbles, and Cairo turns back to him to make another cut from the center of his chest all the way to the nads. Pearl watches as Cairo pulls the skin aside, brown on the outside and pink and yellow on the inside.

“What do you plan to do with it, then?”

Pearl is instantly as curious as the next person. “I’ll figure it out,” Karleen says with a shrug.

“Let me know when you need a job, I could use a new assistant,” Cairo tells her as Karleen moves to exit the room. Pearl prances after her, but not before blowing the dead man on the table a raspberry.

Feeling an odd mix of light and leaden, Pearl catches herself traipsing behind her Columbine. _I’ll figure it out_ can mean many things, and incineration has yet to be ruled out. Now, if only she could think of something to keep Karleen from doing the unthinkable... 

Ah, of course, interaction is a good thing. She bounds off before Karleen so she gets lost in the crowd of uniformed medical students on their way to class, slides out of the gate, then morphs into an old lady. Her costume disappears below a tattered frock, her hat beneath a veil. When Karleen materializes from inside the gate, Pearl greets her in her best gravelly and weary voice, “Spare an old gran a coin, and I’ll let you know of fortune that will have you leaping with joy.”

Now, Manila by and large is of bad reputation, and there is nothing psychic in a wrinkly old woman, but because this is the Harlequin, Karleen takes out not a coin but a bill that she slips onto Pearl’s outstretched hand.

Pearl looks at the orange bill, and she is overcome by something she can’t quite place. Something that she hasn’t felt since she she can remember. 

“Do you know the Harlequin?” Pearl says, and she inwardly flinches, because the Harlequin isn’t predisposed to tell the truth. There is the secret to successful harlequinades. A reputable prankster never reveals her tricks.

Karleen’s eyebrows come together. “A character in the commedia dell’arte. A clown. Contemporarily, a character in the DC comics?”

“Neither,” Pearl tells her, shaking her veiled head. This revelation once more confounds her. While it’s not the entire truth, it is still part of it. Why she is suddenly slipping is elusive.

She opens her mouth, but she catches herself as she was about to bare the whole history of her being. Instead, she summons forth a noise akin to choking, which then turns to a coughing fit, becoming of the elderly. When she has finished, she looks at Karleen’s expectant face, and it eats away at the Harlequin’s self-restraint. 

“You okay?” Karleen asks, genuinely concerned.

“Just fine, dearie,” Pearl says, throat clogging up for no apparent reason at all.

Karleen is silent for a while, but she has places to be, and so she prompts, “And you were saying?”

And she looks so beautiful in the gray light of February, cheeks so high and lips so alluring that Pearl supplies before her brain can process, “The Harlequin has given you her heart. Now you must discover its beat.”

Panic drowns Pearl not for the first time that day, and she points to the street. “Oh look, a robber!”

And Karleen, being good, kind-hearted Karleen, turns to the otherwise peaceful street of Pedro Gil, then to the now empty spot where Pearl stands, not as a veiled granny but as the befuddled, invisible Harlequin.

When Karleen sets out to trot over to wherever she needs to be, Pearl tails her with far less enthusiasm. Begrudgingly, she trips a lad with not nice thoughts as he gazes upon the cash drawer inside one of the many 7-11 stores along the street. His face hits the glass window, and when he rights himself, he comes up with a bleeding nose and a string of curses escaping from his lips.

Pearl’s drastic turn of mood isn’t any better when she and Karleen enter an obscure coffee shop in Bocobo, and it sours all the more when the proprietor, a dimpled handsome man named Gavreel, halloos Karleen with more than the appropriate level of gusto from behind the counter.

“Hello, Gav,” Karleen says with a salute, stopping in front of Gavreel.

“What’s for today?” the man asks, and Pearl wrinkles her nose at him.

“Garlic rice and scrambled eggs, please. And hot choco, and ketchup,” Karleen answers. “Bring me a steak knife, too, will you?”

“Sure thing, ma’am,” Gavreel says, ringing up her order and offering her receipt and order number with one of his sickeningly-sweet smiles. “Give me ten minutes.”

“Thanks,” Karleen says, turning to one of the empty tables where she sits. She takes out Pearl’s heart in the sandwich bag and sets it upon the tabletop.

The only waitress on shift, bespectacled and sporting a pixie cut, greets Karleen as she passes by to bus one of the many tables in the café. Pearl, still feeling out of it, decides to swap dishes of unsuspecting customers. On his way from bringing Karleen’s order, Pearl trips Gavreel, and the man curses as Pearl giggles against her palm, sat on the floor.

“Dude, what is _that?”_ the redhaired waitress inquires when she passes by Pearl to bus another table. Pearl thinks to prank her, too, but oddly enough, she doesn’t feel like it at all.

“Iron supplement,” Karleen says.

“You anemic or something?” the waitress, apparently named Alex—or so her name tag declares—adds.

“Not anymore.”

Pearl looks up from where she’s perched, and sees Karleen cutting up her heart into small pieces with the steak knife. She piles her fork high with eggs and the raw meat, scoops up some ketchup, and then she chews, hard, then swallows.

The Harlequin watches in idle enchantment as Karleen continues to eat the rubbery meat with her eggs and rice. When she sips her hot choco, her eyes meet Pearl’s for real for the first time.

“Up now,” Karleen tells her, serious and unsmiling. “Let’s talk outside.”

And Pearl, stripped of the agency rendered by invisibility, trudges after Karleen who leaves two hundred pesos on the table before she exits the café and sits on one of the unkempt plant boxes by the roadside.

If she were feeling like herself, Pearl would have gone and capered towards Karleen, but she can’t bring herself to do much else but plop down next to her, a sense of loss that is so foreign she thinks she has finally regained her symmetry hovering above her like a dark cloud.

“Who are you?” Karleen asks, taking out paper-wrapped gum from her jacket and popping a couple pellets into her mouth.

“I am the Harlequin,” Pearl says, forlornly. “And I love you. You’re my Columbine.”

Karleen blows a bubble with her gum, which she pops. “No, you are not, no, you do not, and no, I am not.” She plucks the red and blue and white hat off Pearl's head, and Pearl feels her stomach sink. Karleen did it so easily; maybe she wouldn’t have had Pearl kept her hatpin on. “Show me your real face.”

And Pearl does just that, her makeup melting away.

“Not bad,” her Columbine says. Karleen bursts another bubble as she puts on Pearl’s hat, then sticks out her hand, palm up. Pearl turns to it, expecting to see the lines that on another day she should be able to read, but instead she finds a gloved hand. She turns to her staff, her most precious cane, and with a sob, she hands it over.

“Riveting stuff,” Karleen says, twirling the wand so that ribbons the colors of the rainbow erupt from it. “Is this the proper way of using it?”

She doesn’t wait for Pearl to answer, springing to her feet and tapping the wand on her hat. As she’s engulfed in sparkles and smoke, Pearl sees her red and blue and white costume no longer festooned with diamonds fade into plain white. Before her, Karleen’s denim jacket has gone, and in place is a canary yellow ensemble with bright red diamonds. 

Pearl sobs again, but she can’t tell exactly why. Very seldom has she done so in recent memory. “You’re not going to leave me, are you? You are my Valentine.”

“But that is what a Harlequin does, isn’t it? We go on harlequinades. We change costumes. We change identities.”

“What happens to me?”

“You stay,” the Harlequin says, and she places a chaste kiss on Pearl’s temple. Pearl sobs a final time, shutting her eyes, and when she opens them, there remains only the road, desolate as expected of the lull prior to lunch rush.

“Mayora!”

Pearl turns from where she’s seated on the plant box and sees Alex by the door of the coffee shop, waving at her.

“You done rejecting the poor dude? That’s the third one already and it's barely 10 AM,” she tells her, laughter in her tone. “C’mon now, I need help with the dishes.”

Something catches at the corner of Pearl’s eyes, and she sees a discarded bouquet of flowers by the sidewalk. She takes stock of herself, in plain white clothing, kitchen aide’s clothing, and suddenly she remembers.

She looks up at Alex again. She’s smiling at her. _Today is Valentine’s Day. Tell her you love her today._

Pearl’s chest throbs at the thought. She stands up and walks over to Alex who slips her arm around her waist and squeezes, a gesture that Pearl hopes is not merely of comfort. They disappear into the kitchen, where Pearl sees a plate of half-eaten garlic rice, eggs, and what looks to be raw, bloody meat. She pokes at one of the gristle cuts, brings it to her nose, sniffs, and, for reasons she can never fully articulate, slips it into her mouth. 

It tastes of rust, and she swallows before she can even chew, feeling stupid and gross.

“Happy Valentine’s Day, Alex,” Pearl says to the bespectacled waitress as she stands next to her on the kitchen sink. “What are you doing tonight?”

“Taking you out to dinner, hopefully,” Alex tells her.

Pearl looks at her, spies the carmine-dusted cheeks, and smiles. “I would like that very much.”

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you think!
> 
> If you want to yell at me on Twitter, feel free to do so: [@_bspctcldwrites](https://twitter.com/_bspctcldwrites/).


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